When the state Department of Environmental Protection closed down a third of the Delaware Bay to shellfishing this week, Barney Hollinger immediately laid off the three employees on his oyster boat.

"Everything stops," said Hollinger, chairman of the Delaware Bay Shellfish Council. "The restaurants that were buying our oysters, the oyster dealers, pretty much stopped."

In an industry struggling to survive in New Jersey, the suspension of shellfish harvesting has nervous oystermen questioning their future and wondering if reams of regulations imposed over the years have done any good.

Hollinger said he had collected about a quarter of his 1,208-bushel limit before the ban was ordered Tuesday. Working out of Port Norris, he and the other oystermen work from April to early November.

He said roughly 75 oyster boats harvested in the affected area, and he estimated the industry is losing anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 a day. In a business worth between $3 million and $6 million annually, that may not be big bucks, but it has a ripple effect, he said.

"My people are laid off -- you don't work, you don't get paid," he said. And for an area of New Jersey with high unemployment and poverty rates, every day off the water hurts, he said.

State agriculture officials on Tuesday said the shutdown shouldn't cripple the industry, because it does not include parts of the bay where aquaculture projects have been underway for several years.

But oystermen are also scratching their heads over why it took more than a month to close the bay after New Jersey shellfish were implicated in sickening two diners in Maryland.

State health officials said the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene alerted them after two people fell ill after eating at a Maryland restaurant.

On Tuesday, DEP indefinitely closed 130 square miles of the Delaware Bay from Lower Alloways Creek in Salem County to the Maurice River inlet in Cumberland County after confirming the illnesses were linked to New Jersey oysters.

The area, roughly one-third of the bay, will remain off limits to fishermen of oysters, clams and mussels until two consecutive tests on oysters there show no high levels of a naturally occurring bacterium, Vibrio parahaemolyticus.

DEP spokeswoman Darlene Yuhas said her agency issued the ban Tuesday, the same day it received notification from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services of two confirmed cases of illness from Vibrio. She said the DEP took samples of oyster tissue the past two days and are awaiting the results before testing again.

Maryland officials alerted New Jersey's Department of Health on Friday, said spokeswoman Dawn Thomas. She said the delay from consumption to reporting is not unusual, because it takes time for doctors to diagnose the cause of the illness and to notify local and state health departments, which in turn track down the offending food.

Thomas also said her department needed to gather more information before contacting the DEP.

Steve Fleetwood, another oysterman, said he was able to move to other oyster beds to keep working, but he said the shutdown could hurt the industry.

"This is a serious thing for us," said Fleetwood, who is also on the executive board of the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference, a nationwide group of state regulators and industry representatives. "When this happens, boy this gives us a black eye real quick."

Fleetwood, general manager of Bivalve Packing Inc. in Port Norris, and Hollinger said they are confident the New Jersey oysters did not contain high levels of Vibrio.

They said tight controls on the industry are focused on decreasing contaminants, including Vibrio, which can cause diarrhea, nausea, abdominal cramps, headaches or blood infections.

"We have no control of a product when it leaves us, although we're always responsible," Fleetwood said sarcastically.